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• Big Lipped Alligator Moment: Quite a lot of toons come and go after one scene with minor to no affect on the plot and are never mentioned again. Most notably, the Ducks' piano duel.
• Broken Base: A minor case. The general opinion is that it's a great film that kickstarted a new healthy era of animation recognized as an art form, but there are professionals and fans who blame Spielberg for changing a cottage industry into a corporate giant that not everyone can get into and only cares about selling tickets.
• Complete Monster: Judge Doom does nothing during the movie to save himself morally at all (probably because he doesn't want to). He invents a chemical known as the Dip that can kill toons, uses it to melt an innocent shoe, sicks the violent weasels on people he feels may be hiding something, and he's willing to do extensive physical harm to people. It also turns out his cane is actually a sheathed sword. The worst part of his character shows when it turns out that not only is he guilty for the death of Marvin Acme, but also the same psychopatic murderous toon responsible for the death of Eddie's brother too, and he seems to be enjoying himself quite well, especially when he's about to saw Eddie in half. And his plan was to kill off the entire Toon population with Dip to profit from their demise to create freeway or that he's too crazy to care. Him being a Toon means that he's a genocidal, psychopathic bigot killing his entire race for either cash or to satisfy his sadism.
  • In addition, an early draft had him as the hunter who killed Bambi's mother.
• Dancing Bear: The movie was sold on the spectacle of animated and live action characters seamlessly integrated across a cameo-laden full-length feature film. As it turns out, this was not a bad thing, and the movie was and is considered to be pretty good.
• Ear Worm: The jazz music subtly playing in the background of most scenes.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The entire Toon Patrol has a surprisingly large fanbase. Admittedly most of them are Furry Fans but for villainous characters who not only never get named, but also don't even survive the movie, Smart Ass and his squad sure have a lot of fans.
  • Jessica Rabbit, for obvious reasons.
• Best Known For Jessica Rabbit: Let's face it, when you create a character that is pure, dripping Fanservice incarnate you guarantee that even those not particularly attentive will remember them... fondly.
• Hell Is That Noise: Doom's high-pitched Toon voice.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In one scene, Jessica Rabbit tells Eddie Valiant, "I'm not bad, I'm just drawn that way." Imagine that after 23 years, one defense lawyer said the same thing about Amanda Knox when comparing her with Jessica during the appeals trial in that she was no Femme Fatale. Amazingly, it was the same "Jessica Rabbit" defense that got Knox and her co-defendant cleared of murder.
  • Twice, there are lines that can be construed as referring to films released later in the Renaissance Age Of Animation; one is the weasels' hyena cousins, and the other is a throwaway line about Quasimodo. These films would not be released for six to eight years, and naturally were not actually being referenced, but it adds a level of depth to the film to work in movies that hadn't been released yet.
  • Daffy Duck riffing on Donald Duck's speech impediment sounds like Hypocritical Humor, but there is some Reality Subtext there. Mel Blanc once said in an interview, he always hated Donald Duck's voice, and said a character where you can rarely tell what they're saying was a total waste.
• Ho Yay: Between Roger Rabbit and Eddie. They kiss, twice.
• Memetic Mutation: "I'm not bad. I'm just drawn this way."
  • "When I killed your brother, I talked JUST LIKE THISSS!!"
• Memetic Sex Godess: Jessica Rabbit's one of the characters who still gets a whole lot of attention over the years. Not that she can help it... She's not bad, she's just drawn that way.
• Misaimed Marketing: This board game where you throw toons into dip.
• Moral Event Horizon: The death of the cartoon shoe that just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time clearly shows how far over the horizon Judge Doom and his minions are. See also Complete Monster above.
• Nausea Fuel: Lena Hyena.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the finale: The eyes. God, the eyes, as well as Judge Doom's insanely high pitched voice.
  "Remember me, Eddie? When I killed your brother, I talked JUST! LIKE! THIS!"
  • Watching a toon getting flattened by a steamroller? Funny. Watching a live action human getting slowly flattened by a steamroller while screaming in agony? Not so funny.
  • The first time we see the calm, collected Jessica Rabbit freak out is pretty frightening.
    Jessica: Oh my God IT'S DIIIIIIIIIIP!
  • Watching the innocent 'toon shoe getting dipped is too much even for the grizzled police officers to take. The red paint dripping off Doom's glove in the aftermath just makes it even more horrid.
  • Wheezy trying to pull his soul back into his body has to have caused some kids nightmares.
• One-Scene Wonder: The toon bullets who help Eddie in his search for Roger before entering Toontown.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The part where Eddie in his darkened office reminiscences about his lost brother/private eye partner when he looks the old pictures and newspapers during the days of them as heroic Toontown detectives. All accompanied by the sentimental Eddie's theme.
  • Also, surprisingly for such a throw-away scene, but who didn't feel sorry for the poor squeaky shoe when they were a child?
• Uncanny Valley: An intentional case, Judge Doom's real eyes. By all accounts, it worked.
  • Even before the big reveal, Doom's appearance and mannerisms are... off. The makeup job applied to Lloyd made his skin appear to not be quite real somehow, and the stiffness of his movements and the stiltedness of his expressions were all designed to call attention to the fact that there was something just not right about the character.
    • Not only that, but those just-not-rights add up to Doom's being a toon if you're paying attention. In the bar, when he offers a reward for bringing in Roger, he makes the chalk squeak much louder than necessary. This could just be him being a Large Ham, but then he starts slipping on the fake eyeballs, something no self-respecting human villain would do, no matter how hammy. Then, if you're Genre Savvy, you wonder whether the toon that killed Eddie's brother will show up again. The steamroller only confirms your suspicions.
  • Christopher Lloyd was given specific instructions never to blink on camera, as a result any time you see his eyes, they always have this unnatural stare.
  • The Neck Lift he gives Roger seems a bit off — it's effortless. He's using toon power, but it's warped — he finds the idea of humiliating a terrified Roger to be funny.
  • He also explicitly puts on a thick, rubber glove when dipping the red shoe, when we've never been given any reason to believe it's harmful to humans and, in fact, are explicitly shown that it's not later in the film. Similarly, when the Dip spills over in the bar, we see Doom make every effort to avoid the spill.
  • Even his personality is an amazing piece of foreshadowing. As mentioned above, he's a Complete Monster with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. We're given no real motivation for why he wants to do the things he's doing, and it's almost unbelievable that anyone would sign off on his Weasels, or allow them to behave the way they do as a legitimate police force. He's completely unrealistic in every possible way. In short, he's cartoonishly evil.
• Villain Decay: This is more of a Base Breaker, but when Doom is revealed to be a Toon, he is either viewed as becoming less threatening as a villain, however others argue that that he becomes more terrifying especially with his hellishly high-pitched voice and eyes.
• Visual Effects Of Awesome: Keep in mind this was before CG was employed in movies. Anytime you see a prop or part of the scenery being moved by a toon, the toon isn't there, so a machine had to be invented solely for that movement and placed right there on the set, such as the toon running through a window to make a hole shape of themselves, a glass being lifted into the toon's mouth to drink it, or piano playing! All the animation was hand-drawn on paper, 98% on ones, then painted on real cels, and then sent off to ILM to be optically composited!
  • Special Effect Failure: However, given the reliance on effects, a few slip-ups were inevitable. One such instance, when Valiant finds Roger in his bed, the edge stays pressed down like Roger is leaning on it when he isn't, then suddenly pops back up several seconds later.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Where do we even start? In general, the whole film feels like an attempt to tear down the Animation Age Ghetto, what with the Double Entendres out the wazoo. Also has the most frightening reveal in a film.
• The Woobie: Poor Roger, The guy gets yanked around by everybody for the whole movie, and although he's a bit wacky after actually going to Toon Town he comes off as rather mild mannered and sweet.
  • That poor little toon shoe.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Eddie Valiant. Yeah, he's alcholic, grumpy and rude. But seeing his tragic backstory where his brother has been killed by a toon - a fact who turned him into a depressive lonely man in contrast to the great Toontown detective he used to be - that shouldn't be a surprise.